Web Magna Carta: WWW inventor calls for ‘online bill of rights’

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web has spoken out against world governments and corporations, which he says are seeking to control the web for their own gain.

He called for a revolutionary bill of rights to guaranty the
web’s independence.

When he invented the nexus 25 years, ago, the British Berners-Lee
dreamed of a neutral space where humanity, with all of its
“ghastly stuff,” would be free to be itself. Now,
however, he sees no choice but to institute a sort of Magna Carta
for the online world – a document that would be modeled on the
13th-century English charter on basic rights and freedoms.

"If a company can control your access to the internet, if
they can control which websites they go to, then they have
tremendous control over your life," Berners-Lee spoke at
London’s ‘Web We Want’ festival, which discussed the future of
the internet and its guidelines.

"If a government can block you going to, for example, the
opposition's political pages, then they can give you a blinkered
view of reality to keep themselves in power."

"Suddenly the power to abuse the open internet has become so
tempting both for government and big companies," he said.

Berners-Lee is active in his mission to counter that; the
59-year-old is the director of the World Wide Web Foundation, a
lobbying body for the advancement of internet policy. A statement
on their website explains that “governments — totalitarian
and democratic alike — are increasingly monitoring and
controlling people’s online communication. Wireless internet
providers are being tempted to slow down traffic on sites with
which they have not made deals."

"Closed content silos are walling off information posted by
their users from the rest of the web. High costs and lack of
locally relevant content, especially in the developing world,
still exclude the majority of the world's people from the web's
global conversation."

“If we, the web’s users, allow these and other trends to
proceed unchecked, the web could be broken into fragmented
islands and its transformative potential frittered away,” he
said.

Last year, Berners-Lee’s work was recognized by Britain’s Queen
Elizabeth II. It was then that he also elaborated on the
scandalous facts of global internet surveillance leaked by former
NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

"The original design of the web of 24 years ago was for a
universal space, we didn't have a particular computer in mind or
browser, or language… When you make something universal … it can
be used for good things or nasty things … we just have to make
sure it's not undercut by any large companies or governments
trying to use it and get total control,” he said, when asked
to comment on Snowden.

The world tried, with varying degrees of success, to mitigate the
damage caused by power-hungry surveillance initiatives. One
ruling by the EU resulted in Google’s ‘right to be forgotten’
policy, which allows users to remove links with information about
themselves. But like other initiatives, there are fears of abuse
and privacy infringement and censorship.

"There have been lots of times that it has been abused, so
now the Magna Carta is about saying...I want a web where I'm not
spied on, where there's no censorship," Berners-Lee said at
the festival.

According to his comment, the only information that should be
kept off the web relates to things that were illegal before the
web, and remain illegal now – such as “child pornography,
fraud, telling someone how to rob a bank,” and the like.